#imogenbaker

The commonality between this week’s three readings can be distilled down to a very simple take-away message: your data is powerful. Your browsing habits, your tweets, your friends on Facebook: these are an everyday, sometimes banal, collection of your personal minutiae and don’t mean anything to you. But in the right hands, these collections are invaluable; they’re aggregates of your most intimate behaviours and contain codes that allow advertisers to craft traps and steal your hard won gold and rare items (Siegel, 2013). In other hands, your data patterns connect you with a community of like-minders, or suggests you watch Murder She Wrote because you loved Star Trek (Harrington, 2013).

Image credit: Buzzfeed.

But who are the ominous ‘they’ and is it really as ominous as all of that? The ‘they’ here are corporations who buy Big Data to better understand what they can convince consumers they need and, as usual, it is both good and bad.

It’s bad that companies you don’t know, trust or choose to help can buy your data to streamline their exploitation of you. It’s bad you have no agency in whether your data is mined.

It’s good that predictive technology has applications in medicine and law-enforcement (Siegel, 2013: 6, 7). It’s good in our day-to-day lives – predictive text, though often hilarious, usually save time. It’s good to be connected with friends and projects that are relevant to you, based on past connections. It’s bad (and creepy) to encounter targeted advertising, suggestively showing you a product you browsed last week.

Internet advertising sometimes lacks integral human intuition. Image credit: Buzzfeed.

It’s good that longitudinal surveys of behaviour can prevent emergency situations. For example, the British National Grid plan their schedule around the television show Eastenders. During ad-breaks on Eastenders, 1.75 million kettles get switched on resulting in a huge surge of electricity usage (Raby, 2013). If they weren’t able to mine data and determine what was causing such a huge surge, people would experience black-outs. Data analysis allows them to plan ahead.

Really, really lack it. Image credit: Buzzfeed.

A side note: Harrington’s article discusses the Twitter discourse that happens online while a show is airing but I wonder – how has torrenting changed this culture? The recurring example of ‘Game of Thrones’ comes to mind, as here in Australia we are able to download GoT on Monday at lunch-time and then we watch it at various times during the night. There’s not one synchronised viewing schedule – will we get the full experience of online discourse, or is the appeal dampened if it’s not in ‘real time’? For me it is, hence why I tweet for qanda and not got GoT. Woodford, Prowd and Bruns’ model for the Twitter Excitement Index supposes that the majority of the audience is viewing the show live. But our culture of downloading shows to keep up with the Jones (the U.S. and U.K.) and the dearth of affordable on-demand packages means that we view new releases in a staggered way and miss out on real-time discourse.

But I digress. As with every investigation of this nature the outcome is: advances in technology always have both good and bad applications. The best way to keep your head above water is to learn about both to manipulate the good to your advantage and the avoid pitfalls of the bad. And take Netflicks suggestions with a grain of salt.

And sometimes they just really know their audience. Image credit: Buzzfeed.

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Harrington, Stephen. 2013. “Ch 18 Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media.” In Twitter and Society edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt & Cornelius Puschmann, 237-248. New York, NY: Peter Lang

Siegel, Eric. 2013. Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die.Hoboken: Wiley Publishing.

Raby, Mark. 2013. “Tea time in Britain causes predictable, massive surge in electricity demand”. Accessed 10th May, 2014. http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predictable-massive-surge-in-electricity-demand-1535023/

Web 2.0 has extended the reach of the call-to-arms so it doesn’t just cross fences, it crosses oceans. Before the Internet, activism was limited to how many people you could call and who would travel for your cause – the radius was much smaller. Now, however, the call goes out to potentially millions. We’re aware of what’s happening everywhere not just in our own backyard. We can’t physically get there most of the time. And the result is slactivism – the act of liking, retweeting and sharing content in deeply felt solidarity and quickly moving on.

Perhaps it’s linked to Gladwell’s theory about high-risk activism. Those who have a strong personal connection to a cause are more likely to risk more to support it. In Gladwell’s example, it was Mississippi Freedom Summer Project volunteers who were risking their lives to work in an extremely hostile place (2010). For Facebook crusaders, however, the cause is an abstract sense of injustice miles away. There’s no deeper motivation to act beyond consoling our discomfort with a supportive, well-meaning like and scrolling on.  Are we desensitised by the sheer amount of causes presented to us by social media? Would we do more than “like” if the injustice were happening in our own city, to our family or friends? Certainly yes, people aren’t biologically apathetic we’re just so far removed from issue at hand that online support is the best we can offer.

But I don’t think it’s all bad news. As I’ve addressed in an earlier post, there is an element of ‘moral panic’ about everything the Internet touches and online activism is no different. But to reiterate: change is not always bad and certainly isn’t ever black and white. Online activism hasn’t replaced physical protests, as demonstrated by the March in March turnout. Online activism also hasn’t corrupted into a self-serving mechanism to help supporters promote their online brands. For example, less than 24 hours after the KONY2012 videos blew up people were already writing articles that questioned the legitimacy of the cause. More recently the #nomakeupselfie was criticized for promoting narcissism and being insensitive to breast cancer patients going through chemotherapy. Kim Stevens for the Brisbane Times says:

“The problem is, to a woman at the height of a chemotherapy regime who barely recognises the reflection that greets her in the mirror, these images are not unattractive at all. She already acutely feels that by being bald, pale and gaunt, there is nothing that deems her attractive by societal standards now. It is self-indulgent and offensive in the extreme to those you are professing to support.” (2014)

The point I’m driving at here is that people are critical of online campaigns and call out flaws as they see them. The real question we should ask is this: has the proliferation of online campaigns tamped out people’s motivation to physically go to protests? Are we replacing offline chanting with online caps-locked comments? Or has the number of people who would to turn up remained the same but is being supplemented by concurrently running online awareness campaigns? I have no idea. If you’re not quashing your privileged shame by guilt-liking FB posts and moving on without any reflection, don’t stop your Facebook campaigning. After all, likes on a page or signatures on a petition are a powerful indicator of discontent if there are enough of them - just be sure to turn up when you can too.

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Gladwell, Malcom. 2010. “Twitter, Facebook, and Social Activism.”. Retrieved on May 2nd 2014 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all 

For digital natives, most everything in life is participatory and there’s no such thing as media that isn’t supported by interactive online content. We came of age with the Internet, spent our summative years online and to us, to participate is normative. But are all participatory acts equal? Let’s look at an online cultural niche that can get really weird...

Fan fiction (heretofore known as ff) is the logical extension of immersive, participatory fandoms but has only proliferated since sharing platforms opened the floodgates. Actually ff has actually been around for a long time, with ye olde writers stealing and rewriting manuscripts if they thought they could do it better. And what are historical biopics if not a form of post-hoc ff? But ff as the media portrays it (an embarrassing morass of porn barely concealed by plot) was only born in the 60s (Colville, 2011).

So ff is old-school, but is it legal? Sort of. Under US and Australian copyright law, ff is legal-ish on the condition that it is “transformative” (significantly different from the original), non-commercial and doesn’t affect the value of the original work (Chua, 2007, 219, 225). Tensions arise when ff breaks out of the fair-use caveats and gains recognition in its own right. 50 Shades of Grey was originally based on a Twilight ff. Names were changed in the published version but not in the original ff which was set in the Twilight universe. Where is the line between fandom participation and copyright infringement? Do imitations/adaptations like 50 Shades actually benefit the original franchise by drumming up publicity and interest? Relating to this is the idea Burgess and Green proposed: that validation of these new media forms are still being measured by “their subsequent ability to pass through the gate-keeping mechanisms of old media” (2009, 24).

This is related to the stigma surrounding ff and a general wariness of all things user produced (Wikipedia anyone?). Ff is particularly derided because 1). a lot of the contributors are young and using the platform to exercise their frustrations/curiosities 2). because of this a lot of the content is explicit 3). much like porn, no kink or pairing is left unturned. There is a baseness to ff that is picked up on by media and used to characterise the movement that doesn’t encapsulate the psychological subtleties and motivations of ff writers or legitimize their craft as any more than masturbatorial fantasies.

Ff has become so common and idiosyncratic as a genre that even it has garnered parodies of itself. What is generally agreed to be the worst ff ever written, My Immortal, has been turned into a web series, a dramatic reading on Youtube and has its own ff parodies. In many cases, suspiciously awful ffs have turned out to be the work of trolls/insightful internet comedians (Robertson, 2013). In this respect, ff is moderated and controlled – not a free-for-all nonsense orgy - and popular enough to warrant external comment and criticism.

However, to say that ff is a democratic movement would be giving undue credit – ff doesn’t give any real power or economy to the fans. It’s a quirk of success, it may infrequently draw the attention of a benevolent producer (Shefrin , 2004) but in practice it’s too stunted by unprofessionalism to be a threat to old media hierarchies. Ff is the weird cousin of participatory online fandoms which gives the illusion of user autonomy and freedom but is ultimately benefitting the franchise by providing free advertising, fan participation and comprehensive (often confronting) feedback.

Burgess, Jean and Green, Joshua. 2009. “YouTube and the Mainstream Media.” In YouTube: Digital Media and Society Series. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Chua, Ernest. 2007. “Fan fiction and copyright; mutually exclusive, coexistable or something else?”. Murdoch University e-Law Journal 14 (2) 215-230.

Colville, C. 2011. “5 Reasons Pop Culture Is Run by Fan-Fiction.” Accessed 2 March. 2014. http://www.cracked.com/article_19084_5-reasons-pop-culture-run-by-fan-fiction.html#ixzz2xz0FjWdS

Robertson, Adi. 2013. “The worst thing ever written.” Accessed 3rd March, 2014. http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/10/5166462/the-worst-thing-ever-written-a-history-of-trollfic

While I listened to Jonathan Zittrain’s 2009 lecture on cloud computing and online labour, a big apathetic slice of me was thinking “Well everyone’s gotta make a buck and I certainly don’t want to pay directly for online services so – have at it.” Apparently not everyone feels that way. I thought that I didn’t mind if my online ‘labour’ was being used. I was going to be doing it anyway and I was getting something in return too. Much like the blue-whale takes no heed of parasitic little fish, I was floating through the Internet sucking up krill and that’s all that mattered. But this theory starts to break down when you reposition yourself not as the self-important whale but as a little fish being preyed upon by invisible sharks.

The moral dilemma herein lies in the lack of transparency. If you consider the flow of labour as an ‘ecological system’ then harnessing the incidental labour of all ‘nodes’ creates a highly efficient and economical closed flow. Efficient to what end, however, is the question. In nature, an efficient system would have zero waste and sustain a stable population. On the Internet however, growth is everything and the idea of incidental online labour aims to take advantage of processes that already happen.

The Internet is a complex system and as it expands, people move to plug the niches within the established architecture.  Fuchs says that the participation of the audience is sold as a commodity and therefore financially quantitative (2013, 107) but to invite sustainable participation, something of value must be offered to the audience. So what do we get for our participation? How much is free access to Facebook etc., worth to you? Would you pay a monthly fee if it meant no more advertising? Mechanisms like this create a hierarchy between those wealthy enough to pay their way out of advertising and those who can’t.

As the old (offline) adage goes ‘nothing in life is free’, so why do we expect everything online to be free? Content we access online benefits the audience and our participation benefits the creator. In nature this would be considered mutualism but may be more akin to symbiosis – one party benefits and the other isn't significantly harmed. In a capitalist society with no intuition for growth ceilings, can harvesting incidental labour ever be truly mutualistic?

Zittrain mentions in his lecture that the Iranian Government use online labour to identify people. This is where we start to see the real pitfalls of separating means and end. Henry Ford pioneered the use of a production line to mass-produce cars but the same technique was appropriated by others to mass-produce weaponry, with the labourers having little to no idea about what they were supporting and surely violating a reasonable person’s ethics.

If processes that harvest online labour were required to disclose their end product, the power would shift back to the audience. Though legislation struggles to reflect the evolving landscape of the Internet, no doubt in time we will see regulatory law for online labour and, hopefully, we the audience can become protected, majestic whales once more.

  Fuchs, Christian. 2013. “The Power and Political Economy of Social Media.” In Social Media: An Introduction, 97 – 125. London: Sage Publications.

The great prophet Andy Warhol once said…blah blah…15 minutes of fame. Everyone has heard it. Technology was changing the structure of celebrity before the Internet was even conceived of. Green and Jenkins theorize a model of content valuation and dispersal (“spreadability”) that utilizes the “complex modes of audience-ship that emerge within participatory culture” (2011, 118) and that maps Warhol’s prediction. Memetic distribution pathways (read: content gaining rapid Internet fame) have, for better and worse, changed the means of “celebrification”.

The modalities of fame have moved away from the traditional model of ascribed celebrity and towards a democratic model of achieved celebrity (Ritzer, 2004, 86). The traditional form of ascribed celebrity refers to fame gained by either inheritance (such as the royal family, Paris Hilton, celebrity children) or by a dint of a calculated campaign based around a passive audience. As Jay Rosen says to “traditional media people”: “You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.” (2006). Ascribed celebrities are presented to the audience, however new media has transferred the tools and mechanisms of fame to the public and has shaped the uprising of ‘ordinary’ celebrities – celebrities whose currency lies in their similarity to the audience as opposed to their difference (van Krieken, 2012,10).

Being discovered isn’t a ‘thing’ like it used to be – there are no record label execs cruising malls to find the latest talent. Social media and sharing platforms are where the next generation of celebrities are being discovered. Justin Bieber (Youtube), Lily Allen (Myspace) and Katy Perry (Myspace) were all ‘discovered’ on the Internet after their music garnered online interest. This democratic model of recognition has also created different niches which never existed before web 2.0, such as Youtube celebrities, Vine celebrities and famous bloggers all of whom have been nominated and supported by a participatory audience. Traditional celebrities have also expanded/extended their existing fame by forging popular online personas.

  Famous Youtube comedian Lisanova

Famous Vine creator Jerome Jarre

Returning to van Krieken’s theory that current celebrity models value ‘sameness’ rather than ‘difference’ we see that some of the most endearing examples of Internet fame happen to average folk not by coincidence, but because they are average – the most common denominator across a widespread audience and therefore the most “spreadable”. Green and Jenkin’s case study of Susan Boyle’s rise to fame exemplifies this theory. Boyle’s story was unique because she is an underdog and more similar to the typical viewer than a glossed-over, pre-packaged starlet. For Green and Jenkin’s ‘prosumers’, similarity has a shelf life – fame still creates a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The real investment however is in watching the underdog’s journey from same to different, from ugly to beautiful, from downtrodden to inspirational (2011, 112). This is not to imply that old media won’t exploit new dispersal models to the same end as before, or that celebrity as we know it as has changed. Perhaps the final destination of celebritydom will remain, but the path is now paved by an interactive, participatory audience.

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References

Green, Joshua and Jenkins, Henry. 2011. The Handbook of Media Audiences. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Ritzer, George. 2004. The Globalization of nothing . SAGE.

Rosen, Jay. 2006. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” Accessed March 21, 2014. http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html